Spain

DIVIDED
into ten sections through religion, war, and nature—mountains, rocks, burnt
plateaus where no grass grows—Spain remained for two thousand years without
gaining command of her language. The Romans, the Arabs, and the French had, by
turns, affirmed their domination through their imposing architectures, upon
which the Spanish soul, still obscure and fragmentary, imprinted only furtive
traces, until the hour when Catholic, political, and military unity interpreted
its need for action. Then there was something like a tragic conflagration. The
flames spurted forth from the shadow and pierced the walls in order to gain the
summit of the towers; a frenzy of cruelty and melancholy passion appeared
everywhere; the naves and choirs were encumbered with tortured altar-pieces and
with stalls hollowed out with carvings; the alcazars and the mosques were seized
and Christs of wood and altars of gold were set up in them. Everything pointed
to a somber aspiration toward suffering, through which the voluptuous desire to
enter upon life sought to punish itself even before life was mastered. But the
painted idols which the artisans of the people had been carving to place at the
crossroads ever since the first centuries of Christianity, the Calvaries, the
niches, and the thin, bleeding gods hung by the nails in their hands, sinking
on their spreading knees, could neither inspire in a people unused to great
abstract constructions the power to build a fitting sanctuary, nor check the
invasion of the less terrible images which the enriched cities and the
triumphant monarchy summoned from abroad. The union of Castile and Aragon and
the conquest of Granada did not bear fruit until later, and then only in a few
solitary minds which wrested the soul of Spain from the foreigner only to
render it a secret cult in their proud meditation. Spain has no collective
expression defining for the future that jealous unity which it affirmed, sword
in hand, upon the routes of the world.

Its
sudden expansion through war subjected it for a hundred years to the peoples it
had vanquished. The annexation of Flanders, the war with France, and the
conquest of Italy deliver Castile to the Flemings and the French, and the
eastern sea-coast to the Italians. The infiltration did not, moreover, wait
political events before coming about. Jan van Eyck came to Castile soon after
finishing the painting of the "Mystic Lamb" at Ghent, and, through
Luiz Dalmau, the painter, conquered Catalonia. Later, the French sculptor
Philippe Vigarni brings to Toledo and to Granada the knowledge of the men of
the north, which his brother, the painter Juan de Borgona, a hard, tense
draftsman, tries to place at the service of Italian idealism. Bartolomeo
Ordonez, a sculptor of Barcelona, goes to Carrara in search of marble from
which to carve his overloaded tombs, hollowed out like a piece of goldsmith's
work, and Gil de Siloe peoples the chapels of Burgos with them. Ordonez also
brings back the theatrical redundance and the grandiloquent mannerisms which
are beginning to decompose Italy. Damian Forment, confronted by her, restrains
the rude strength of his native Aragon. The power necessary to isolate
themselves belongs only to the free spirits of culminating epochs made aware,
by invulnerable pride, of the dangers of these contacts. But when a race is
developing, all its energies are concentrated upon conquest and expansion. The
Primitives, suddenly transported to a world which is descending the other side
of the slope, allowed themselves to be dazzled by the skill and the audacity of
the decadent artists. They think that they can learn. They abandon what they
know. They give over to the men of civilization the control of their senses.

For a
people without character the defeat is a decisive one. A people bent on
defining itself, on the contrary, suddenly perceives that it has as yet said
nothing about itself and employs the instrument which it did not forge to
explore its depths. When Alonso Berruguete, the son of a good painter-workman
who had helped with his ingenuous collaboration in the works of Juan de
Borgona, had learned in Italy the speech of Michael Angelo, the Renaissance
could penetrate no farther into Spain. The ease of Berruguete in making a torso
twist from the hips, in sending a face back into the shadow of a shoulder, in
furrowing a muscular belly with darks and lights, and in pursuing the most
terrible and most grave reality in a cadaver stretched upon the «ground, bears
witness to the fact that Spain is reacting at the very moment when she seems to
be surrendering herself. She utilizes a style which she has learned, and which
she will try to forget, only to deepen her faith in an ever-increasing cruelty.
Berruguete had just died when Juan de Herrera constructed the Escorial. Spain
has no architecture. But if there is a monument which interprets the efforts
she had to make in order to resist the invasion of the complicated and
declamatory styles born of the meeting of the Gothic men, the Arabs, and the
Renaissance men, it is that monument. It is arid. Its long walls, bare and
gray, are of a frightful sadness. It arises from a desert of stone, alone with
the somber sun. Philip II died there in a cell without an opening to the sky.

Toward
the end of the violent century which had seen Spain seizing Portugal and the
two Sicilies, dominating Germany, vanquishing France, thrusting back Islam,
conquering America, and launching the Armada against England, Philip II
summoned, for the purpose of ornamenting his tomb, certain bad painters who at
Genoa were prolonging the death struggle of Rome and of Venice. He was
following the example of his father who had secured the service of Titian. But
Titian had just died a centenarian, and Philip II, accustomed, since his
childhood, to the magnificent forms which Italian art at the moment of its full
bloom had been unfolding before his eyes, preferred, as always, the reflection
and the husk to the somber spirit whose outline was being traced in the wake of
the armies, the missions, and the ships starting forth at his command upon
every path of apostleship and conquest. It is possible that Anton Mor, the
Hollander turned Spaniard, who was so profoundly impressed with the pale faces
and the feverish glances seen at his court, and that the Castilians, Sanchez
Coello and Pantoja de la Cruz, whose sad and haughty spirit had bowed so
spontaneously before the harsh etiquette which held the bored infantas upright
in their stiff dresses, had declared themselves unable to decorate the walls.
Morales, the mystic and barbarous painter of Estremadura, was not made for this
task, either, and, besides, he was about to die. But it was already known that
there were good painters at Valencia. At Cordova there existed a flourishing
school. And above all, there was, at Toledo, an artist, who had himself been
formed by the Italians, and who was painting, at the moment when the Escorial
[Built from 1563 1584] was being finished, one of the greatest works of
painting [“The Burial of the Count of Orgaz” dates from 1584], revealing, at a
single stroke, the soul of Spain to itself—he, a Greek reared in Venice, at the
very time that the Spanish hesitated to affirm it.